I Peter 1:13-19

3. Purify yourself.

That is one of the 10 things you need to be doing in waiting for Christ's return. So if we hope for and desire to be firstfruits of God at His coming, we must work on becoming pure. Peter puts it a little bit differently. Let us go back to I Peter 1, verses 13 through 19. He writes here,

So they just use basically two different words for saying the same thing. Becoming pure is the same thing as becoming holy. It is making our conduct align with the Holy One Himself, become like Jesus Christ. Now notice here, he says in verse 13 that it requires sobriety, we have to be serious and in control of ourselves. It requires conviction (Martin was talking about that a little bit this morning). It requires obedience, and it requires us putting off the old man in the fear of God.

We want to get rid of all of those negatives, all of those things that we have absorbed either from our own selfish human nature, from the world, or from Satan's influence. We have got to get rid of all of that. That is the only way we are going to become pure, and then we have to, once that is all swept out, as it were, we have to fill it up with good things. We have to fill it up with the obedience and all those virtues of God that we possibly can, so that when Christ appears, we are going to be like Him. That is what is going to enable us to see Him as He is.

I Peter 1:17-19

Let us connect I Peter 1:18 to that principle and to a couple of other principles that we have talked about now in this sermon. What have we been redeemed from? We have been redeemed from aimless conduct or the traditions of men. We have been redeemed from the philosophies that were produced by men of corrupt minds, or maybe even demons. We have been redeemed from those traditions, those cultures, those ways of life that have instilled within us the traditions, the prejudices, the ways of thinking, and the ways of conduct that are at odds with the truth of God.

I think that is very meaningful and what Peter is saying here in I Peter 1 is that the very thing that we are called upon by God to do as a result of the revelation of His truth to us is to come out of what we have been learning from the time that we were babies. What that means is a processing of virtually everything that undergirds the thinking that we have learned early in this life.

Peter also tells us why. He said that it is aimless. I would like you to kill a deer without aiming the gun. If you do not aim the gun and you pull the trigger, the bullet is liable to go anywhere. It is aimless and that is what he is talking about here. Men's lives apart from the truth of God are aimless. They are going nowhere—nowhere near the target.

I Peter 1:17-21

The emphasis here in I Peter 1:17-21 is on the cost of reconciliation. Now, that is very important to God's purpose because a major portion of our desire to obey God comes from a sense of obligation to God and Christ with regard to our appreciation for how much was paid for us to be free.